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I'll thank him for you
OVR: 31
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Thursday
Posts: 32,751
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Re: Manny Pacquiao (50-3-2) VS Josha Clottey (35-3) March 13th at Cowboys Staduim
WTF. Doesn't sound promising for Clottey SMH
Michel Comte for ESPN The Magazine
This story appears in the March 8 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
Joshua Clottey arrives at Contenders Gym in Fort Lauderdale for the second consecutive afternoon. His black eyes cast around the place, February clouds rolling through the glass doors behind him. A boxer's camp before a big fight normally has a romance about it: Muhammad Ali holding court in Deer Lake; Lennox Lewis running through snow in the Poconos; Oscar De La Hoya chopping wood in Big Bear. But there's no romance at Contenders. There isn't even a working shower. It's a single-ring gym at a community athletic complex named Carter Park, marked by only a small blue plaque that says Activity Room. Two local fighters shadowbox nearby in board shorts and running shoes; one is wearing a Roscoe's House of Chicken 'n Waffles T-shirt. This is not what the dream is supposed to look like.
Clottey thought the same thing yesterday, when he left after his first day here -- sweated up and without a shower -- determined to find somewhere else to hold his camp. But there was nowhere else to go, and Clottey had no one to help him get there. On his long list of things to worry about these days, hot water is close to the bottom. And so here he is, back once again, ducking into an adjacent office to get his hands wrapped. Lenny De Jesus, a 64-year-old New Yorker, part-time locksmith and longtime boxing satellite -- "I'm kind of a hidden guy," he says -- pulls out the wraps, yellow and white, and spools them around Clottey's hands. The two men know each other from John's Gym in the Bronx, a New York City joint close to where Clottey keeps a cheap apartment. De Jesus is watched by two of Clottey's rotund friends from his native Ghana: Bruce, who will do the pad work, and Kwaku, who will drive and make dinner. The Ghanaians are a silent, mysterious duo. "I think they might be family," De Jesus says with a shrug. While most fighters arrive at training camp with a full entourage, these are the three men who will make up Clottey's corner. They have only five weeks to find matching shirts, and to prepare him for the fight of his life.
Clottey's known for his toughness. In a narrow 2006 loss to Antonio Margarito, he fought the last eight rounds with a busted tendon in his hand.
"He just has to go in there and throw punches," De Jesus says. "What else are you going to do against that guy?"
That guy is Manny Pacquiao, pound-for-pound the best fighter in the world -- "Best I've ever seen," says legendary promoter Bob Arum -- a champion in seven weight classes; dismantler of De La Hoya, Erik Morales and Ricky Hatton; future congressman in the Philippines; and strong enough for Floyd Mayweather Jr. to suggest that he must be on something normally given to horses. That accusation allowed Mayweather to duck Pacquiao in a fight many predicted would have been the biggest pay-per-view event in boxing history.
Instead, Joshua Clottey became Mayweather's doomed proxy, chosen to fight Pacquiao on March 13 in front of an expected 40,000 fans at Cowboys Stadium. Out of that 40,000, it's a good bet that only De Jesus, Bruce and Kwaku will be rooting for him. The other 39,997 will see Clottey for what he actually is: a hiccup, a substitute, a placeholder. Pacquiao-Mayweather would have been the sort of fight that girlfriends talk about, would have broken records and earned each fighter around $40 million. Jerry Jones had been told that Cowboys Stadium wasn't good enough to hold that bout. Now, instead of the best fighter in the world facing the second-best fighter in the world, here stands Joshua Clottey -- most admired, perhaps, for his ability to take a punch -- getting his hands wrapped by a part-time locksmith in an office with a single gold cup on an otherwise empty trophy shelf. He is the man nobody wants to see, except in the back of an ambulance.
"I can't think about all that," the 32-year-old Clottey says, shaking his head. "Otherwise I don't sleep no more. Right now, I sleep very good."
In a short-staffed camp, De Jesus has taken on the bulk of the worry. (At the moment, Bruce is more concerned about the workout's sound track; he takes out a compact disc and heads over to the stereo in the corner. Kwaku is thinking he might make chicken soup for dinner.) "I'll be honest with you," De Jesus says after he's finished the wraps. "Our first job will be getting this kid up those three steps and into the ring."
Most trainers set bigger goals for their fighters than on-time delivery, but De Jesus has been around long enough -- having worked Pacquiao's corner as a cut man many years ago -- to know how badly the odds have been stacked against his fighter. It's just that everyone in a challenger's camp usually does a better job of ignoring the odds, often by invoking the fat ghost of Buster Douglas. This time, though, nobody bothers pretending, except Arum, whose Top Rank stable happens to include Pacquiao and Clottey. "I really believe this is the better fight," he says, trying to banish thoughts of what could have been. "Joshua won't run." That's probably true, but only because Clottey has nobody to run to. Arum has left him largely to his own devices, not wanting to see his greatest asset, Pacquiao, devalued by a shock loss to some African. Clottey's current manager, a self-described "businessman from Jersey" named Vinny Scolpino, whom Clottey threatened to drop last year after a public contract dispute and money woes, isn't exactly boxing's most influential power broker either. And most important: Godwin Kotey, the Ghanaian trainer who helped start Clottey on his way to 35 wins, has been denied his U.S. visa. (Clottey flew to Ghana in January to help the trainer negotiate with the U.S. embassy, but was unsuccessful.) All of which has left Clottey in this broken-down Fort Lauderdale gym with De Jesus, one man substituting for Floyd Mayweather and the other for an entire machine. "I guess I'm it," De Jesus says with his hands in the air.
Just this February morning there were reports that Pacquiao has already sparred more than 24 rounds at the famed Wild Card gym in Hollywood, Calif., against Abdullai Amidu, a Ghanaian who has boxed with Clottey since they were kids. (Clottey is genuinely saddened and bewildered by the idea of a friend's possibly selling his secrets. "I don't know why he is doing that," he says.) After Clottey made the drive up yesterday from his little rented house in a very different Hollywood to this gym with a busted shower, he banged out just three rounds against Damian "Devo" Frias, a Cuban welterweight whose name appears in the smallest of type on a poster in the gym, alongside some guy named Joey "Twinkle Fingers" Hernandez.
Clottey will spar with Frias again today, this time for six rounds. He begins his warmup by jumping rope, a little toy plastic one he found draped over one of the turnbuckles. He stares at his reflection in a wide mirror, then pulls on his heavy black gloves and headgear. He throws light jabs at a speed bag, loosening his shoulders. He glances up and sees Mayweather staring back at him from a poster ("Witness the Speed of Light"), and quickly returns his gaze to the mirror. Bruce finally gets the music going, and Ghanaian electro- pop fills the room, an unlikely combination of African beats and Auto-Tune. One of the most upbeat songs, by the duo Ruff-N-Smooth, will be Clottey's walk-in music in Dallas. The song is called "Swagger"; the opening lyrics rhyme "banana" with "Ghana." Clottey can't help dancing, admiring himself in the mirror, his broad, smooth face breaking out in a smile. He looks blissfully unaware. "I love this song," he says. "Make me feel good. And when you dance, you don't know what is going on. You don't think. You just do." He shimmies some more before he furrows his brow and drops his hands. The music has stopped doing its job. "Swagger," he says. "I do not know what this word means."
"Joshua is just a lovely boy," Arum says from Las Vegas. Arum has been a boxing promoter for 200 years. When the fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather fell apart, he considered a number of substitutes before finally settling on Clottey. His thinking: Like Pacquiao, the Ghanaian has a decent record (35-3 with 20 KOs), represents limited one-punch risk and wouldn't be a pain in the $##. "The antithesis of Floyd Mayweather Jr.," Arum says.
Clottey flew to Ghana to retrieve his longtime trainer. He was unsuccesful. "I don't understand why nobody helps me," he says.
Clottey first saw his name thrown into the mix for the Pacquiao fight online. He was in his native Accra, Ghana's port capital on western Africa's famed Gold Coast, when he read that Arum had floated him as a possible replacement. "You're joking," Clottey remembers thinking. Clottey called Scolpino to find out if there was any truth to the story, and Scolpino got in touch with Arum. "When I told Vinny we were ready to move," Arum says with a laugh, "he told me he'd collapsed in his chair." Clottey then asked Scolpino to set up camp somewhere warm and close to a beach, because running on the beaches of Accra had always brought him good luck, and he needed all the good luck he could get. Scolpino knew the guys who run Contenders, and just five weeks before the fight, Clottey was on a plane to Florida. "A gym is a gym, you know?" Scolpino says.
The businessman from Jersey did take a harder look at the cash, though. Never mind his humble surroundings: Clottey is guaranteed his biggest payday, $1.25 million, and will be given a share of PPV revenues for the first time in his 15-year pro career. Depending on how well the fight sells, he could gross more than $3 million -- a life-changing amount of money, even after the majority of it gets stripped away by boxing's inevitable pilot fish. (Damian Frias, for starters, has been demanding $1,000 a week to play make-believe Pacquiao.) "I don't really want to talk about money," Clottey says. "But this is huge for me. I come from very, very poor background. My father don't have nothing except two sons. We both become fighters. My brother, he can't fight anymore, so it's up to me. I have to take care of a lot of people. If I'm walking in Accra, I'm in trouble, because everybody needs money there. But now my family is going to be very, very good. We are going to lack nothing. I will have my house, and I will have my cars. And if I win this fight ... "
This is the first time Clottey has allowed himself to talk about the fight. After Freddie Roach, Pacquiao's trainer, predicted that his fighter will win by knockout, the Ghanaian waved away the thought like heat. ("I give my respect to his feelings," Clottey says. "That's his right to say anything.") But now, despite the happy music filling the room and despite his staring only in the mirror, Clottey has been pushed into a corner, forced to think about what's coming. Maybe, deep down, he believes he can win. Maybe he'll get lucky. Maybe Pacquiao will take him too lightly, and Clottey will see an opening and land a miracle punch that will change the course of two men's futures. Maybe he can be the next Buster Douglas. Or, maybe ...
"Maybe Pacquiao's as fast as everybody tell me," Clottey says. "Maybe he will knock me out. If he knock me out, then I will say to the whole world: 'If I'm telling you that I'm seeing a ghost in the ring, don't brush me off. It won't be a joke. If I tell you I'm seeing a ghost, see that ghost with me.' "
He climbs through the ropes -- there's just one step at Contenders -- and into the ring. De Jesus grabs a bottle of water from a row of bottles and starts throwing handfuls of it into Clottey's face and onto his arms, like a priest. Neither man knows that it's the wrong bottle, and that the water has salt in it, a poor man's electrolytes. Clottey's eyes begin to sting and fill with tears. A buzzer sounds. He turns to face Frias, but he can't see a thing.
The rest of the gym goes quiet except for those African beats. (The banana song is kind of catchy.) Everybody else, including the dude in the Roscoe's T-shirt, stops flailing at the heavy bags and takes a seat on the wooden benches that surround the ring. No matter what happens on March 13, Joshua Clottey has suddenly become someone worth watching. He's become famous for his proximity to fame, the boxer about to become only the 53rd man on the planet to know firsthand what it's like to be punched by Manny Pacquiao. "You can see on his face, he's in a dream," Arum says.
Clottey is no pushover, but at Jerry Jones' press conference at Cowboys stadium, one fighter received most of the attention.
They held a press conference at Cowboys Stadium in January. Clottey saw himself on that giant TV hanging from the roof, walked out of the tunnel in a cloud of smoke, and the Cowboys cheerleaders kicked their white boots into the air around him. It was a long way from Accra, a long way from his place in the Bronx. He looked like a man who'd been struck by lightning. Despite appearances, though, Clottey says he's always known this fight was in his future. It was less a dream and more an inevitability. "Never a doubt," he says. His optimism is surprising. What would have been Clottey's biggest fight, against Shane Mosley (Mayweather's May 1 opponent) last Dec. 26, was taken out from under him. (HBO execs reportedly didn't want to stage the fight so close to Christmas.) "It was devastating for him," Arum says. Now, just weeks later, Clottey's been given an even bigger chance on an even bigger stage. "I don't drink alcohol, no smoking, I don't gamble," he says. "Good things happen to good people." For him, there's no other explanation. And there's no need to worry about what comes next.
Because good things happen to good people.
He touches gloves with Frias. Like Pacquiao, the Cuban is a southpaw, but there the comparison ends. Clottey blinks the salt out of his eyes and shows his strength, easily pushing Frias around the ring. He has good power and he is big for a welterweight -- he could weigh as much as 160 pounds on fight night -- but he doesn't possess much flash or grace. He doesn't even bother moving his head; if he keeps it this still against Pacquiao, the Filipino might very well remove it, take it home and bury it in his backyard. Near the end of the third round, Clottey shouts and launches himself into Frias, his feet leaving the canvas and his fist crashing into the Cuban's headgear. That's enough of that. Halfway through the workout, Frias quits. He gestures to his right shoulder, saying it's hurt. "We'll find someone new for tomorrow," De Jesus says.
Later, Bruce works the pads for Clottey, their rhythm broken by the rust, and after Clottey spends a round dancing to the music, the workout's over, a little over an hour after it began. He takes a swig of water, spits it into the air and catches it with the top of his head. He's looking forward to his shower.
Except that it's still broken, even though Scolpino had promised it would be fixed. Clottey looks like he's been struck by lightning again. The gym rats point him across a long parking lot to Carter Park's pool, where there are working showers. Clottey shakes his head and walks across the asphalt, a strong breeze blowing out toward the water. He reappears a few minutes later in shorts and flip-flops. Everybody bundles into their rented white van, Kwaku trying to find his way back to the house in Hollywood. It's a small stucco bungalow with a palm tree out front and a pool out back. Kids play on the street. In a corner of the kitchen are crates of Gatorade -- the real deal, not salt dumped into water. It's a small, big thing. "I love drinking this," Clottey says. He takes a glass of it out to the pool, ice clinking, and lies back in a lounge chair. De Jesus leaves to work with another fighter for the rest of the afternoon; Kwaku gets to work on the chicken soup; Bruce decides to go for a swim. He takes off his shirt, revealing a big belly and a tattoo of a hand dunking a basketball that looks to have been drawn by a child. Bruce rubs it self-consciously and says his first words of the afternoon: "It's incomplete."
Clottey waits for his soup on the lounger. The smell of it comes out from the kitchen window. Birds sing. Kicked back like this, under palm trees by the pool, he looks for the first time less like a contender and more like a champion. It's possible to look at him, here in the sun, and marvel at how far he has come, this man from Ghana who, for one night at least, will find himself at the center of boxing. Looking at him, it's hard not to want to believe what he believes. It's hard not to hope that good things really do happen to good people.
And it's just as hard not to tell him to run.
"Do you ever think -- "
"No think," he says, and he closes his eyes.
The wind picks up. It catches an old awning over the back of the house. The awning breaks off its mooring, falls across the patio door and knocks over a flowerpot sitting on a step. The flowerpot hits the concrete and shatters into pieces. Bruce lets out a little scream. Clottey doesn't even open his eyes.
Chris Jones is a contributing writer for ESPN The Magazine.
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03-02-2010, 08:41 PM
